Show Notes
Dr. Leor Weinberger begins this episode by talking about his motivation for developing a novel therapy for HIV. He explains the fundamental mismatch between the mutation and transmission of the disease and how our therapies work, which inspired him to take a novel approach to try and combat the disease.
We discuss topics such as the potential for scientists to give up on an HIV vaccine and why it seems like there are no good general antiviral drugs. To lead up to discussing Dr. Weinberger's new therapy, we hear a bit about the history of HIV therapeutics. After walking us through this history, culminating with the development and widespread adoption of the modern day drug cocktails for HIV patients, Dr. Weinberger introduces us to a fundamentally new type of therapy he has been working on to overcome previous barriers. He explains some of the origins of this new approach and explains how this approach is based on molecular parasites that steal resources from the virus.
This new approach, which Dr. Weinberger refers to as therapeutic interfering particles, uses defective particles that function not by poisoning the virus but by stealing from the virus. He then explains how this approach overcomes the fundamental mismatch between HIV and HIV therapies. We hear some of the story of the long road from the initial idea for this work to the status of the therapy today. Dr. Weinberger also explains a sort of happy accident that happened in a petri dish that may have enabled this research to finally move forward.
Finally, we spend some time on the lower level mechanisms of how this therapy works, such as how you could deliver this treatment into a patient. We also talk about safety and the potential for public hesitancy. We conclude with a mention about the potential for this type of approach to be used for COVID-19 therapy.
Watch Dr. Weinberger's TED Talk on this topic at https://www.ted.com/talks/leor_weinberger_can_we_create_vaccines_that_mutate_and_spread?language=en
More from The Bioinformatics and Beyond Podcast
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Dr. Justin Siegel explains the past, present, and future of wet lab work and wet lab automation. We start by hearing a description of what it is like to work in a wet lab, covering the contrast between the excitement of seeing life changing results and the countless hours of monotony that is often involved to produce these results.
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This episode concludes the podcast’s series of episodes focused on space biology and space omics. NASA scientist Dr. Afshin Beheshti discusses the many high level hazards and corresponding molecular features of spaceflight throughout this episode. For instance, we begin with a discussion of the hazards of radiation and microgravity. Dr. Beheshti spends time explaining a high level view of what each hazard is, why it is a concern for spaceflight, and educates us on many useful and interesting pieces of information for each hazard. Further hazards discussed include confinement and isolation, hostile and closed environment, and distance from Earth.
This episode discusses Dr. Tejaswini Mishra’s recent publication in Nature Biomedical Engineering: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-020-00640-6 Dr. Mishra begins the episode by explaining the origin story of this work and how the idea for this paper came to be. She then explains how this study enrolled thousands of participants and used the participants’ smartwatch or wearable device data to detect COVID-19 infections. After explaining how this study began, Dr. Mishra discusses how she and her team came up with two main algorithms for detecting COVID-19 infections from wearables data. Dr. Mishra also discusses the many variables that could be monitored with wearables in addition to standard measures used for predicting illnesses like heart rate. Finally, we hear about the main results of this study including the successful detection of several active COVID-19 infections in study participants. We also hear a comparison of this work against the COVID-19 wearables study featured previously on the podcast. We end by hearing Dr. Mishra’s thoughts on the future of wearables for detecting infectious diseases and for improving human health in general.